Housing conditions and ill health.

Lack of empirical evidence that living in damp houses has detrimental effects on health may partly be due to inadequate research. A preliminary study was therefore carried out of a random sample of council owned residences in a deprived area of Edinburgh, a respondent from consenting households being interviewed to obtain a profile of the physical and mental health of all adults and children. In addition, information was gathered about other factors that might be important, particularly smoking and selective bias in the allocation of tenants to houses. Independent measures of dampness were made by environmental health officers. No conclusive effects of damp on the health of adults were identified. Nevertheless, children living in damp houses, especially where fungal mould was present, had higher rates of respiratory symptoms, which were unrelated to smoking in the household, and higher rates of symptoms of infection and stress. Housing should remain an important public health issue, and the effects of damp warrant further investigation.     

Housing,health, and illness.

Cases referred to a community physician in his role as medical adviser to a housing authority were reviewed. A new system of classifying health problems was devised because conventional diagnostic classification was found to be inappropriate. The effectiveness of medical intervention was apparently low, since only 29 out of 612 (4.7%) applications for rehousing on medical grounds were successful. The effectiveness of the community physician''s role was limited by the available resources and the number of cases he could take before the housing committee. It is proposed that the use of medical resources for intervention in such cases is acceptably efficient, though this proposal is based on value judgement rather than on economic grounds. Doctors should be concerned in improving housing conditions, which are still unacceptably poor in many parts of Britain, in the interests of improving general standards of public health.     

Housing and health. What quality of air?

Summary The renewal of air is essential for good hygiene in housing. The list of polluting elements in dwellings is very long: particles, smells, acarus, allergens, formaldehyde, radon. All these polluting elements influence negatively our health. Apart from the complete elimination of the generating cources of polluting elements, an important factor for the pollution treatment is a good-working ventilation. Mechanical ventilation is the only system allowing an acceptable permanent ventilation during all seasons. It can be simple flow by mechanical exhaust and natural air income, or double flow by both mechanical exhaust and air supply. Double flow ventilation allows the filtering of fresh air and the heat transfer from exhaust to fresh air. It enables the elimination of certain allergens and the lowering, to a reasonable value, of the concentration of other polluting agents present in the dwellings inside air.     

Medicalizing homelessness: the production of self-blame and self-governing within homeless shelters

This article draws upon three years of ethnographic research within an emergency homeless shelter in Massachusetts to explore the subject-making effects of routine shelter helping practices. A medicalized discourse of deviancy is uncovered that provides the dominant conceptual framework within which both concerned homeless people and shelter staff remain enmeshed. As a result, helping practices focus on detecting, diagnosing, and treating understood deviancy within the bodies or selves of homeless people. The dominant discursive practices produce homeless subjects who learn to look within their selves for the "cause" of their homelessness. Treatment focuses on reforming and governing the self. Alternative discourses suggesting the need for practices challenging broader political economic processes are thus marginalized as peripheral and unreasonable.